``First, my problem was I had just replaced my motherboard on my custom build PC. Once I got Windows 7 64-bit loaded and everything working, I sat up to clone my system drive. The drive is a 500GB Seagate Barracude, SATA 2 drive. Cloning locally to an identical drive.

When booting into g4u, my transfer speeds were extremely slow. Normally, my 500 Gb clones take only about 90 minutes. But this was still working after over 6 hours. The g4u transfer speed was reporting only 1.5 Mb/sec.

I shut things down, and went into my system BIOS. I noticed that the SATA mode was set to "IDE Mode" for my drives. I changed this to "AHCI Mode" and continued to boot into g4u. This worked to fix the transfer speeds, and my clone finished normally. Getting 83 Mb/sec.

Once the drive was finished, I attempted to boot into Windows, but it would not boot. I had to change my BIOS back to "IDE Mode", then Windows behaved normally.

Upon researching this, I am now learning that you should enable AHCI Mode BEFORE installing Windows for it to work. Apparently, if Windows is not installed while using AHCI Mode, it disables the drivers for AHCI on the system drive. So if you later enable AHCI in your BIOS as I did, Windows will not have the driver loaded. I saw there is a fix on the Microsoft web site, but I haven't attempted to try it yet.

If someone else runs into a similar problem, hopefully this will help you.''

FWIW, g4u-2.5beta1 is based on NetBSD-current from January 2012, so checking your BIOS may help anyone seeing bad disk performance out there.
(Emphasizes in the text added by me)

[Tags: g4u, performance]

Remember that this is a test release, so your feedback is wanted - either to me in person, or to the g4u-help mailing list. Thanks!

Here's a full list of changes:

• New commands "uploadmbr" and "slurpmbr" to backup and restore the master boot record, which includes the partition table. Required to restore a partition to an empty disk.
• New command "copymbr" to copy the MBR from one disk to another, similar to "copydisk"
• New command "wipedisk" to write the disk full with 0-bytes once from start (sector 0) to end (last sector)
• Enable command line history/editing by forcing /bin/sh to be built without -DSMALL (ugly hack... there be lots of dragons!)
• When setting up a fresh compile tree, g4u patches are now applied automagically without aborting the build
• Error detection was now enabled in the dd(1) command, which is the core of g4u (surprise!). With that, disks with broken/unreadable sectors should now be copied, skipping the unreadable sectors and copying the rest. This affects a number of programs: copydisk, copypart, uploaddisk, uploadpart. BEWARE: I wasn't able to actually test this as I do not have a disk with bad sectors here. Please report back your experiences!!!
• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2012-01-12
• New drivers added to the kernel:
  • RDC PMX-1000 IDE controllers
  • Intel SCH IDE controllers
  • TOSHIBA PICCOLO controllers
  • Attansic/Atheros L1C/L2C Ethernet
  • Broadcom BCM43xx wireless
  • Agere/LSI ET1310/ET1301 Gigabit Ethernet
  • RDC R6040 10/100 Ethernet
  • USB LCDs and USB-VGA adaptors, e.g.:
  • DisplayLink DL-1x0/1x5
  • Option N.V. Wireless USB WAN modems
  • Microsoft RNDIS specifications USB ethernet
  • Atheros AR9001U USB Wifi
  • Intersil PrismGT USB Wifi
  • Virtio PCI, memory balloon, disk & network devices
  • ... and many more that slipped past QA
• ... and any driver updates, optimizations and bug fixes and other enhancements from NetBSD-current

• ISO
• compressed ISO
• First floppy
• 2nd floppy
• 3rd floppy
• all 3 floppies
• sources

Details include setting up a TFTP server for loading the bootloader and getting DHCP sending out the right files.

[Tags: g4u, pxe]

To go on from there, I found that my NetBSD VM's only disk was too small to do anything useful. Options for enlarging that came to mind:

1. NFS - see 'panic' above, no go.
2. Adding another (virtual) disk - easily doable, but I felt like not adding one
3. Extending the existing disk - adventure time!

1. Enlarge the last file system on disk
2. Fix the partition table to add another partition for the new space

For those in a similar situation, here are the steps to use the newly gained space on an enlarged (virtual) disk:

1. Prepare: save the old output of "dmesg" (/var/run/dmesg.boot is OK)

2. Enlarge - VMware Fusion wants a shutdown for that, you cannot suspend the machine

3. After booting, run a diff on the saved "dmesg" output, to learn what the old and new size of the disk is, in sectors. My diff looks like this, note the size change in sectors:

   -wd0: 10240 MB, 22192 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 20971520 sectors
   +wd0: 20480 MB, 44384 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 41943040 sectors 

4. Backup the existing/old disklabel, just in case: disklabel wd0 >disklabel.BAK

5. Edit the disklabel: disklabel -e wd0

6. In the editor, adjust the disk size in sectors from 20971520 to 41943040:

   total sectors: 41943040 

7. Partition 'd' is the full disk on i386/amd64, it starts at sector 0 and is 41943040 sectors big

   #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
    d:  41943040         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 -  44384*)
   

8. Partition 'c' is the NetBSD part of the disk. As this VM only has NetBSD, all the usable space is used. Note that "usable" space excludes the first 63 sectors of the disk (mbr etc.), i.e. it is 41943040 - 63 = 41942977 sectors:

   #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
    c:  41942977        63     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0*-  44384*)
   

9. After this everything is in sync with the new disk again, and the remaining/new space can be used for new partition 'e'. As the new space starts where the disk used to end, its offset is the old size, 20971520 sectors.

   The size of the new partition expands from the offset sector 20971520 to the end of the disk at sector 41943040, i.e. the partition size is:

   % expr 41943040 - 20971520
   20971520
   

   In total, this gives for the new partition:

   #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
    e:  20971520  20971520     4.2BSD   2048 16384     0  # (Cyl.  22192*-  44384*)
   

10. Last, create file system, mount and populate:

    # newfs /dev/rwd0e
    # mkdir /disk2
    # echo '/dev/wd0e /disk2 ffs rw,log 2 2' >>/etc/fstab
    # mount /disk2
    # cd /usr ; pax -rw -pe -v stuff /disk2
    # rm -fr stuff ; ln -s /disk2/stuff .
    

P.S.: I'm offering choccolate to anyone fixing crossbuilding of NetBSD-current from Mac OS X. Any takers?

[Tags: disklabel, fusion, g4u, vmware]

Three years of time have passed since the last full release of g4u. Here's a list of what's new / changes in g4u 2.4:

• Major new supported device types include bluetooth keyboards and SD/MMC cards - feedback highly appreciated!
• Lots of new drivers. Too many to list, please see the g4u section of my blog at http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html?-tags=g4u for details.
• Based on the NetBSD development version from Sep 2009
• Source builds native and without root privileges on NetBSD 5.0 and crossbuilds also without root privileges from Mac OS X (tested) and probably others (untested; expected: Solaris, Linux).

What is g4u? ``g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.''

Get it now:

• ISO
• compressed ISO
• First floppy
• 2nd floppy
• 3rd floppy
• all 3 floppies
• sources

• Make this build with NetBSD-current as of 2009-08-30
• Trim kernel some more (NFS server, quotas)
• Put only on the CD what's really needed (31MB->5MB)
• Drivers for:
  • Marvell Hercules-I/II SATA controller
  • SiI SteelVine SATA controllers
  • Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet cards
  • Attansic/Atheros L1E Ethernet cards & PHY
  • SD/MMC cards as media - feedback highly appreciated!

What is g4u? ``g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.''

Get it now:

• ISO
• compressed ISO
• First floppy
• 2nd floppy
• 3rd floppy
• all 3 floppies
• sources

• Support Bluetooth keyboard and USB hubs
• ACPI support is enabled by default. SMP is, too, but that's not really used in g4u; They can both be disabled form the bootloader in case of problems.
• Moved away from GENERIC kernel back to customized kernel, to avoid bloat through too many drivers that aren't needed in g4u (audio, video, ...)
• The build structure was adjusted to NetBSD's latest framework, which loads the kernel from CD, then loads the ramdisk, too, before starting the kernel. No more kernel+ramdisk for now. (Need to re-evaluate situation for PXE)
• Drivers for:
  • AMD CS5535/CS5536 and Intel PIIX4 PCI bridges
  • Areca SATA PCI RAID controllers
  • Workbit NinjaATA-32 CardBus IDE controllers
  • Realtek 8139C+/8169/8169S/8110S cardbus wlan cards
  • Geode CSC and ScanLogic SL811HS USB controllers
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN
  • JMicron JMC2[56]0 ethernet
  • Atheros L2 Fast-Ethernet
  • Realtek 8139C+/8169/8169S/8110S cardbus network cards
• ... and any driver updates, bug fixes and other enhancements from NetBSD-current
• This version of g4u was again cross-compiled on Mac OS X. To get your own build, grap NetBSD-current sources from yesterday (20081122), unpack the g4u source .tgz then "cd .../src ; sh g4u-build" and report what happens.

What is g4u? ``g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.''

Get it now:

• ISO
• compressed ISO
• First floppy
• 2nd floppy
• 3rd floppy
• all 3 floppies
• sources

• ACPI Support enabled
• Support Bluetooth keyboard and USB hubs
• Drivers for AMD CS5535/CS5536 and Intel PIIX4 PCI bridges
• Driver for the Areca SATA PCI RAID controllers
• Driver for Workbit NinjaATA-32 CardBus IDE controllers
• Driver for Realtek 8139C+/8169/8169S/8110S cardbus wlan cards
• Driver for Geode CSC and ScanLogic SL811HS USB controllers
• ... and any driver updates, bug fixes and other enhancements from NetBSD-current

BTW, as a funny side note, this version was not built on NetBSD but on Mac OS X - the procedure should be the same on both systems (and maybe other Unix systems, like e.g. Linux): Get NetBSD-current sources as of today (20080120), run "cd .../src ; sh g4u-build" and report what happens.

[Tags: g4u]

• ISO
• compressed ISO
• First floppy
• 2nd floppy
• 3rd floppy
• all 3 floppies
• sources

Users of PERC- and Broadcom-equipped Dell-Servers, please test and report back success or failure. Include dmesg snipped if failure!

[Tags: g4u]

Either way, I've finally setup a working development environment for g4u again using NetBSD in Parallels and the g4u sources from the g4u 2.3 release. After the neccessary adjustments to match g4u against latest g4u, I have a working build environment again.

Things to look forward to include a 2.4alpha1 release that has latest sources (for backup reasons :-), and support for Bluetooth keyboards as well as latest drivers, esp. ones for the PERC RAID controllers and Broadcom ethernet controllers in Dell servers that people requested repeatedly, and that have finally showed up in NetBSD. Furthermore, there may be kernels with and without ACPI support. Last, I'm wondering if anyone is still using the floppy version of g4u... Anyone? Send mail!

[Tags: g4u]

(Thanks to "skrueger" for pointing me at this!)

[Tags: g4u, solaris]

Multiple license can be purchased for more machines, I'm open for discussing volume discounts. I will of course send you an invoice for every purchase! Please contact me by email if you're interested.

Thank you for your support of g4u!

[Tags: g4u]

• Linuxdays Chemnitz: I was only there for my presentation on sunday, due to not feeling too well the days before. Still, Stefan, Jörg, Charlie and many others staffed the booth just fine, and I think every single household in and around Chemnitz has a NetBSD install and/or Live CD now. :)

  Related talks to mention are Stefan Schumacher's talk on hardening systems with systrace and deleting data. My own talk was not too NetBSD specific, showing an application on how to implement dynamic DNS with some retail web/domain hoster. Slides for my talks are available as OpenOffice .ODP and as PDF. (I'll reconsider the move from TeX/prosper to OpenOffice after it was NOT as easy as I expected to find a machine running OOo for presentation purpose, after my laptop's harddisk crashed on the way to Chemnitz!)

• While at roadshows: Stefan Schumacher has made DIN A4 pkgsrc flyers in english and german language.

• NetBSD's puff-based FUSE implementation "refuse" is now in a state to also run the NTFS-g3 filesystem, which offers read/write support for NTFS. It's available from pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g.

• Google News found me an article that NetBSD stack supports Geode NAS design: ``Wasabi Systems Inc.'s BSD-based NAS (network attached storage) software stack now supports a Geode-based reference design from AMD. Wasabi Storage Builder for NAS, combined with AMD's Geode LX NAS RDK (reference design kit), provides a secure, reliable platform for the development of NAS devices, according to Wasabi. ''

  While that's all fine for Wasabi, it should be noted that whatever the company Wasabi offers is not automatically available in the freely available operating system called NetBSD. Integration efforts would have to happen first, so the headline of that article is unfortunately misleading if not to say plain wrong!

• Another article that's more to the point: Julio M. Merino Vidal has worked on getting multiboot support into NetBSD, and in his article ``Making NetBSD Multiboot-Compatible'' he talks more about it.

• Andrew Doran has done lots of work on NetBSD's thread and SMP implementation recently, and he has made a comparison between performance of the Scheduler-Activations-based code in NetBSD 4 and the one that will be in NetBSD 5 (AKA NetBSD-current, currently numbered as 4.99.13). See his mail to tech-kern or watch the images for 'make cleandir' on an empty source tree and the MySQL supersmack benchmark.

• Google runs another Summer of Code, and this year it's not clear upfront who will be allowed as mentoring organizations. NetBSD is ready to participate again, and there's an official announcement from NetBSD about this, including pointers to our suggested/wanted list of projects and the project application HowTo. People interested in submitting a project proposal (via google!) are encouraged to use the remaining time until the deadline to discuss their proposals on the public NetBSD tech-* lists! (Personally I'll try to stay out of GSoC this year to finish some reallife work. At least that's the plan so far ...)

• Three new security advisories were released:
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-001: Integer overflow in ktruser()
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-002: Integer overflows in Render and DBE extensions
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-003: BIND multiple denial of service vulnerabilities

• Another article that doesn't mention NetBSD but g4u: ``How to Install a New Hard Drive: Tech Clinic'' by Joel Johnson. From the article: `` To make your new drive work like your old drive, you'll need a disk "cloner." There are a myriad of options, from commercial solutions such as the old favorite Ghost from Symantec ($70; symantec.com) and Copy Commander from VCom ($35; v-com.com) to free applications, such as MaxBlast from Maxtor, that come bundled with hard drives. If you're comfortable mucking around with Linux/BSD, I've had great luck with the free g4u application. If you have a local file server, you can even send the disk image from your laptop to an FTP site, install the larger drive, then FTP it back to your laptop, obviating the need for a drive enclosure''.

``Parallels today released a free update to Parallels Desktop for Mac to enhance its virtualization software with a new installation assistant tool, shared networking support, and official compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The latest release of Parallels Desktop for Mac also supports Microsoft's recently-released Windows Vista operating system, adds several additional features, and repairs numerous bugs. Parallels Desktop for Mac runs 'guest' operating systems inside a Mac by allowing that operating system to run alongside Mac OS X, managing system resources as the two systems co-exist side-by-side. The latest revision ensures that Solaris guest operating systems don't hang after suspending or resuming, and includes an improved Parallels Tools package. Parallels Desktop now offers full support for OpenBSD 3.8 as a guest operating system, and ensures that the G4U hard disk cloning tool works in virtual machines.''

Someone please go and tell them that they also support NetBSD with that move, and tell the world about that! :-)

[Tags: g4u, parallels]

• CDROM ISOs:
  Compressed -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3.iso.zip
  Uncompressed -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3.iso

• Floppies:
  All of them -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3.fs.zip
  First one -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3-1.fs
  Second one -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3-2.fs

• Source -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3.tgz

The book consists of two parts: the first one talks about IPv6 programming, and the second one lists a number of relevant RFCs. The Programming part includes an overview of the IPv6 APIs, puts emphasis on writing address-independent programming and gives a fair number of guidelines in that area. It then describes details for porting applications to support IPv6, with details on what to look for in client and server code, followed by a number of tips for IPv6 programming. A practical example that shows how existing client and server applications (nail and popa3d) can be changed to support IPv6. The second part of the book consists of 270 (of ~360!) pages of printed RFCs, which is a bit over the top IMHO - if I'd wanted to read them I would know where to find them. On the other hand I have them all in one place, so I guess that can be excused.

Overall the book is rather technical and very much on the spot, written for people with programming and Unix background to learn on how to get the job done without much fluff. Minor nits are the long appendix and that images appear a bit blurry, but that shouldn't stop anyone from reading the book - go for it!

[Tags: books, g4u, ipv6]

Fun stuff so far includes

• Copied a dual drive Tivo
• Saved Novell NetWare server disks
• Copied a Nokia IP330 Checkpoint Firewall 1 boxes
• Install several clusters of firewalls, compute machines, school workstations, etc.

  * Floppies:
    All of them -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3.fs.zip
    First one -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3-1.fs
    Second one -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3-2.fs
    Third one -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3-3.fs

  * CDROMs:
    Compressed -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3.iso.zip
    Uncompressed -> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3.iso

  * Source:
    http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3beta3.tgz
    (There's a g4u-build script in there that should do all the work...
    I'll update the build docs for the final release)

More information is available on the g4u homepage, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#history and http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/.

Enjoy!

[Tags: g4u]

I haven't heared of anyone cloning an Intel-Mac with g4u natively (via Bootcamp, of course) yet, but I guess there's a known-working way to this now. Anyone got some experiences about g4u on an Intel-Mac? Please post to the g4u-help list!

[Tags: g4u, parallels]

Citing from the article, ``The authors show how to use image backups to return a system to a known state with a few commands. [...] g4u [...] is a simple, elegant and well-documented tool that boots a NetBSD kernel''

For those that forgot, g4u ("ghost for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

Bad news first: I haven't seen any money from Google so far. This is due to their policy that they start paying only after you hit $100US one month, which I didn't do the first month (and that mostly because I enabled this in mid-september). I expect this to change in the future, though.

So what happened so far? The two websites I have Google AdWords on are the g4u homepage and my NetBSD blog. In the past ~2 months, the g4u homepage got about 42.000 hits and the blog got 9.100 hits. On the g4u page, 539 people were interested in the ads displayed, while ads on the blogs were of interest to 180 people. I admit I have no idea how Google determines payment per hit/click, but the money they show I've "earned" is $129 for the g4u homepage and $71 for the blog.

So far that's nothing that will pay my bills, but at least it will pay some food every now and then, or some stuff I could use for future NetBSD booths...

(BTW, if you want to help out in that regard directly: I'm VERY MUCH appreciating more help from the NetBSD community at conferences etc. where NetBSD booths are, after manning the Systems booth alone for three days last week; for the monetary help you can speed that up with paypal ;-)

[Tags: g4u, hubertf]

Feel free to use the extra links to inform yourself about related news and products, it won't hurt me! ;-)

P.S.: I've also updated the image of the dancing daemon a bit to make it more fit for the NetBSD theme. The idea is from EFNet #NetBSD's mspo. :)

[Tags: g4u, hubertf]

The problem is getting the necessary cash to do that, and that's where I've started wondering if adding ads to my NetBSD blog, the short articles as well as the g4u homepage would bring in enough revenue to do the stunt.

Before forcing this down my users' (your!) throat, I'd like to hear some feedback from you -- ads on my NetBSD blog and g4u homepage, good or bad? Tell me!

If I don't get a total uproar I'll probably give it a few months trial period to evaluate this. If someone feels like sharing their lottery win instead, or just putting their money where their VERY big mouth is , I'll be happy to take donations - let me know!

Update: Stefan got me a link to the Google Will Eat Itself project.

[Tags: g4u, hubertf]

Both g4u and Live View are free of charge.''

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

... which is unavailable right now, thanks to an Internal Server Error at SourceForge. Grab the g4u-2.3alpha1, then send your report!

[Tags: g4u]

The editors were kind enough to send me a copy of the magazine on request, and judging with my non-existing swedish, the article goes through setup of the FTP server needed for FTP, outlines the steps to backup and restore a full disk as well as a single partition and how to clone a disk locally.

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

See the g4u history for all the details.

[Tags: g4u]

Indeed... maybe i should rename the project. But then again, "Unix" (and setups involving any Unix derivates like Sun's Solaris and NetBSD in a multiboot environment) is what g4u was made to clone, first and foremost.

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

(Very well said - I know there's a lot of stuff that could be added to g4u, but this is mostly an issue of time*effort*possibility to do; NTFS resize from NetBSD, anyone? :-)

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

Also, it seems paypal changed some details on their webpage, and the paypal buttons on both the the g4u homepage and the NetBSD t-shirt page were broken. I have fixed them (even if I don't like the new images they offer as much as I liked the old ones :-), and for g4u there's now also a subscription possible to send me some spare cash you may have on a regular base.

[Tags: g4u, hubertf, paypal]

Quite some time ago, at around the times of g4u 1.14/1.15 (see the g4u history), I came to the decision that just typing "make" is nice for releasing simple software, but with increasing complexity, some more formal testing before release is nice to have to find those trivial errors that DO sneak in. As a result, I fired my previous quality assurance department and made up my own g4u release plan, which is roughly: "RUN THIS LIST OF TESTS BEFORE THE RELEASE".

Simple, eh? It saved my butt a few times since then.

Now what highly complex list of commands do I run before a release? Here's the list (keep in mind that g4u exists to copy partitions and whole disks locally and via network):

% cp harddisk.template harddisk0
% cp harddisk.template harddisk1
% qemu -cdrom g4u.iso -hda harddisk0 -hdb harddisk1

Commands to run:
g4u> dmesg
g4u> ls
g4u> ifconfig -a
g4u> disks
g4u> parts wd0
g4u> parts wd1
g4u> copydisk wd0 wd1
g4u> GZIP=1 uploaddisk upload@10.0.0.3 rwd1d.gz wd1
g4u> slurpdisk  upload@10.0.0.3 rwd1d.gz wd0
g4u> uploadpart upload@10.0.0.3 rwd0a.gz wd0a   
g4u> slurppart  upload@10.0.0.3 rwd0a.gz wd1a
g4u> copypart wd0e wd0f
g4u> copypart wd0f wd0e 

(Seeing something like this in NetBSD would be a longstanding dream of mine... the list would start with "Grab a common configuration of $arch, put the native operating system on it and then install NetBSD on it" and "get X going")

While talking about being happy (I'm bored while waiting for the above regression testing commands right now :-): I think I've found while progress(1) seems to act funny, as documented in NetBSD's PR 33207. (And that supposed fix is actually the reason for doing another round of regression tests :-): stat(2) on a pipe returns some "funny" results, which seems to confuse progress(1):

miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 1' | stat -f %z
1
miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 10' | stat -f %z
0
miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 10' | stat -f %z
10
miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 100' | stat -f %z
100
miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 100' | stat -f %z
100
miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 100' | stat -f %z
100
miyu% perl -e 'print "x" x 100' | stat -f %z
0 

You can find all the details in the history section of the g4u webpage:

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Last, let me thank all those that have donated money to make this beta-release of g4u possible. I'm still working on my PhD thesis (with no financial aid or work contract), and your donations make it possible for me to continue work on g4u and not starve. Those wishing to express their gratitude for where g4u is today, please donate via paypal@feyrer.de, or get in contact for means other than paypal. Thanks!

[Tags: g4u]

In the "cleaning up old mail" department, I have added a new entry to the FAQ telling people what FTP server's good (for those that don't use NetBSD yet :-), and I've added the people that made donations to the g4u donations page.

While talking about donations: don't assume I'm getting rich. Many donations are like $2 to $10, which is nice for some food'n'drinks, but it won't pay my rent or allow me to devote huge globs of time to this project. Unfortunately.

Let me point out one donation in that regard: I always find it interesting to see questions from companies on the g4u list, asking about hundreds of machines to clone, and the very latest hardware, but without ever donating a bit back (hint: a commercial license of a product similar to g4u is like $50, and now take that * the number of your machines to see what you're saving. Split that by two and send it to paypal@feyrer.de to give g4u a bright future!).

Anyways, with all those companies happily using g4u, I'd like to point out one donation that's very special to me: A kindergarten school donated $15 for g4u. Working in education myself, I have a rough impression of how much money they probably have (ie.: none), and this makes it a very, very nice donation to me. Thanks a lot!

[Tags: g4u, rants]

• I've done a bit more work on the next version of g4u, baseically moving the whole build infrastructure to use NetBSD's new 'makefs -t cd9660' and bootxx_cd9660
• While there, I've been working on a framework to build bootf-cds (like the current bootfloppies, i.e. just a small CD with a kernel and a ramdisk with sysinst, no install sets). The latest version of the framework works on i386 and amd, but it actually reinvents a wheel that's already present twice in the NetBSD source tree. So I'll try to find more time to think about the src/etc 'iso-image' target and esp. all the code in src/distrib/cdrom before persuing this.

  My current theory is that NetBSD needs to split the concept of building a "release" into #1 the compiling of all the stuff in $RELEASEDIR, and #2 the postprocessing (creating a bootable CD *with* install sets, taring up sources, and making sure there's a pkgsrc snapshot there, too). Maybe the source taring-up should even be moved to another step #3 that's only done after performing step #2 *all* platforms.

  We'll see when I find more time for this, or maybe if someone picks it up...

• After NetBSD got permission from The Open Group and the IEEE to use text from the POSIX(R) standard some time ago, I'm finally preparing the press release (available soon!) with them.
• Various other coordination stuff for the NetBSD booth at the Chemnitz Linuxday is also taking ways too much time, getting t-shirts and flyers and posters done.